


We Run Parallel

by antimonyandthyme



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, References to Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:08:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29907096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antimonyandthyme/pseuds/antimonyandthyme
Summary: “I always figured I’d be the first to die,” Neil tells him, after a coughing fit leaves two drops of blood on the lip. “Leave it to you to plan otherwise.”
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	We Run Parallel

“I always figured I’d be the first to die,” Neil tells him, after a coughing fit leaves two drops of blood on the lip. He dabs his handkerchief on David’s mouth, red against white, and tosses it to one side brusquely, unable to bear the evidence suggesting different. “Leave it to you to plan otherwise.”

“ _First_ is relative,” David reminds, looking somehow smaller and frailer than he had a moment ago. Neil doesn’t like it. David has always been stronger than Goliath. 

“You’re not as cryptic as you think you’re being. I get it. We both die at different times. You see me go, and now, it’s payback.”

“Always with the dramatics,” David sighs, but he’s smiling now, and it’s tinged with the same vast fondness as when they first met. When Neil couldn’t quite understand why a stranger would look at him this way, adoring and reverent and so helplessly lost. 

“It’s my job, as you well know. Drink your tea.”

“Is it your job to mother me so,” David grimaces at the camomile. Neil refused his request for an espresso, rightly so, at god-fucking-ten in the night. 

It _is_ my job, Neil doesn’t say. It is my job to be everything you need. It is my job to be your shadow. It is my job to watch your six. It is my job to keep you alive, and right now, I’m failing at my job so— “Drink your tea,” Neil repeats evenly.

Suddenly obedient, David takes the mug with two pandas plastered on in oddly suggestive positions. Neil had broken out in hysterics when he’d seen it at a souvenir store in Shanghai, and then David had insisted on getting some. In a burst of inspiration, they’d purchased enough for the rest of the team. They have it on good authority that Ives uses his when he thinks no one is looking. 

“I apologize,” David says. He makes it to half a mug. “I’m not making this easy, am I.”

Neil pulls a face, David laughs. His knuckles are stark against the bedspread. Neil reaches forward, strokes them over and over, as if David’s bones were part of a Cryptex puzzle that he could unlock if only he touched them enough. “You never do.”

\--

_An unexplainable illness_ , the doctor had informed them, bewildered, which they both took to mean, probably too many years breathing inverted oxygen, too many years getting shot at, stabbed at, too many years fracturing his own body and mind trying to save an oblivious world. 

The boss had accepted it with the same single-minded doggedness that he approached everything else with. Neil on the other hand— 

Well.

David catches him checking on the medical equipment for the third time that night. “Neil,” he says, soft. He pats the space next to him.

Neil sits, allows himself to be sucked into David’s gentle gravitational sphere, massive even for a man on his deathbed. He doesn’t ask, _How will I fill this vacuum when you’re gone_ , because there is no filling this, and for once, David will have no solutions. Neil must find his own. 

He asks instead for a task, some lifelong mission that he can dedicate himself to when David is gone.

David smiles, proud and sad. “I have just the one.”

\--

They’re in the middle of _Casablanca_ when Neil thinks to ask, “Any regrets?”

On the screen, Rick urges Ilsa to leave him and board the plane to be with Victor, urges her with a desperation and urgency Neil is intimately familiar with. _‘You’ll regret it,’_ Rick insists, _‘maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.’_

“You’re indulging a dying man to list his troubles?” he’s amused. “I could go on.”

“We’ve got the time,” Neil says, contrary to the fact. Two weeks ago, Wheeler and Ives had stood like snarling guard dogs outside the office doors. Neil was barred from entry. _“You’ll have all the time to work later,”_ Wheeler had said. _“Go on home now,”_ Ives had ordered, in a tone which brooked no argument.

“Regrets,” David muses. His hand is curled in Neil’s. Sand sifting through his fingers no matter how tightly he holds. Snowflakes melting into nothing. A disappearing act made just for the two of them. “I regret not recognizing you, when you come for me. I regret your pain.”

The black-and-white plane takes off with Ilsa. She’ll be safe now. Neil smiles a little. It’s just like David; he’s always been the soldier, the one who moved with an eye on everyone’s well-being but not his own. Even now, staring down the bottomless chasm, David thinks not of himself. Neil seeks to absolve him of all guilt. It's the least he can do.

“That’s it? Well, that doesn’t seem too bad.”

David turns his hand, and they’re palm to palm, heartbeats aligned. Rick says to Louis, as they’re walking away into the fog, _‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’_ and they both forget about regrets for awhile. 

\--

Neil breaks, once. He doesn’t recognize the noises coming out of him, the heaving, gasping wails clawing their way out of his throat. David’s arms tighten around him, stronger than they have ever been, a lifeline to a drowning man.

“Neil,” he breathes his name like a prayer. “Neil, baby.”

All these words to say about love, but none of the time. All these promises to make, but none of the certainty. He sobs his heartbreak into David’s chest. 

“I know,” David says, and he does, doesn’t he. He’s been with this grief for far longer than Neil can think to imagine. Made allies and lovers out of it. “I know.”

When it’s my time, Neil decides, I’ll make it easy for you. 

\--

Neil packs light. A notebook. A mug with misshapen pandas. _His_ favoured handgun. The _Casablanca_ DVD. A washer on a red string tied to his rucksack. 

He goes to find David, because David found him first. 

Then again, _first_ is relative.

**Author's Note:**

> Today in wE MaKE ouR OwN sadNESS


End file.
